STOCKTON - The venerable Hole in the Wall sandwichery may have closed shop in 2009, but its owner couldn't stop slinging sandwiches.

And the downtown lunch scene is so much the richer for it. Bunny's serves up a lot more than sandwiches, with burgers and pizza for lunch and a full breakfast menu. Named for proprietor Mary "Bunny" Leyva, the North Hunter Street eatery is around the corner from Channel Street, the last location for Hole in the Wall, which had been a Stockton tradition for 23 years.

Five of us ducked into Bunny's on a lunch break and found the old tradition reborn, with a broad and unique menu offering tasty meals at a good price. We all ate - and ate well - for less than $40, before tip.

The absolutely delicious pastrami sandwich ($4.80) is probably the best in town. The meat comes from an uncommon source, local food distributor Pre-Peeled Potato, and it's a find.

"I have looked and gone everywhere for every kind of pastrami and I finally found it," Bunny told us. "This was it. This was it."

Thinly sliced and heaped, Bunny super-heats the meat (and Swiss cheese, if you want it) in a steamer before ladling the gooey results onto marbled rye. It comes with the works, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, pickles and mustard if you want them, though purists may reject the tomato as pastrami heresy.

The hot turkey sandwich ($8) is more like a Thanksgiving dinner, with freshly baked turkey piled on top of white bread and covered in gravy with a side of peppery mashed potatoes. And Bunny knows how to cook a turkey - it's long been a staple in her sandwiches, and this was a generous mix of juicy white and dark meat.

With cranberry sauce and a cup of cooked corn, this will have you looking for a couch to watch some football instead of your desk back at work.

The grilled chicken signature sandwich and French fries ($8) came with thick slices of grilled chicken, accompanied by lettuce and tomato on a bread roll. The sandwich delivered a fresh and filling lunch, even as the chicken was a tad dry. The chicken wasn't bland, but for diners who prefer a little bit of spice on a chicken sandwich, this one is not for you. The wide-cut French fries were light and crisp.

The cheeseburger ($4.25) was well executed and well done. All the fixings - tomato, lettuce, pickles and onion - were nice and fresh, cool and crunchy. It gets an extra point for having a slice of raw red onion for that extra bit of sweetness and character.

Considering the size of the kitchen, the signature combo 10-inch pizza ($8.50) was surprisingly good.

It may have been a small pizza, but there's nothing small about the toppings piled high. Five kinds of meat, mushrooms and onions, bell peppers, and - adding a tangy twist - green olives and large chunks of pepperoncini.

The pizza lagged behind the sandwiches, but service was as quick as we needed it to be to get back to work.

Despite the lunch rush, there were plenty of seats free, both at tables and along a narrow counter lining the walls and the window looking out on Hunter Street. And there was still room for some style, with walls decorated with dark-red paint, corrugated metal, mirrors and shelves with a measured sampling of tchotchkes.

The old Hole in the Wall was enough of a fixture that it was featured when the PBS show "Road Trip with Huell Howser" came to town in 2007. There's a framed photograph of Bunny with the late Howser looking over the new restaurant carrying on the old tradition.